"Yoku's Island Express is an adorable and charming oddity. In short, it's an open world Metroidvania pinball game about a tropical island with a Cthulhian elder god problem. As strange a mashup as that description is, I knew I needed to create something just as charmingly strange musically so that the score could function as a character in the game all on its own. Game players hear everything from beat boxing to bebop, medieval madrigals to chiptune basslines, and sinister reggae to Keystone Kops-styled piano chase music. There's a song with pinball machine sounds in the percussion tracks, and that same track has banjo, ocarina, talking drum, and a drunken trombone. There's even one track that uses the DNA sequence of yeast run through a robot-voice generating vocoder as part of the backing track. The score is definitely a little out there," Jesse said of the game's outlandish sound.

In scoring Yoku's Island Express, Jesse experienced total creative freedom: "The developer VILLA GORILLA was super encouraging about all of the nutty ideas I wanted to try. I got to just stretch out and run as wild as I wanted with it. They basically said, 'Just do whatever you want. Just do you.' And for a composer who's spent 15 years working with other people's franchises like Star Wars, MARVEL, Avatar, and Futurama, that was not exactly an easy request to fulfill. I had to go back to those old influences to figure out who I was again. What exactly is my own musical voice? Turns out that it's kind of quirky and weird, but it works. And in a sense, that's exactly the same way I'd describe Yoku's Island Express. It's quirky and weird, but it works.

The imaginative design of the game and the freedom to do whatever I wanted was the biggest influence on the score. I ended up building the soundtrack to be like those in the games I grew up playing: melody is king and the goal is to make you walk away from it humming the songs for the rest of the day. I basically tried to make it a chain of earworms – songs that get stuck in your brain and then won't leave you alone - but, you know, in a good way."